Mac screenshots that upload to Google Drive and copy a share link

Why a screenshot is not a link

The screenshot tools in macOS are good at the capture and indifferent to what happens next. You press a shortcut, you get a file, and the file sits in a folder. That is the right design for a screenshot you are about to paste into a document, and the wrong one for the far more common case: someone is waiting on the other end of a chat window, and what they need is a URL.

Closing that gap by hand takes half a dozen steps every time — save the shot, find it in the Finder, open Drive in a browser, upload, wait, change the file’s access from restricted to anyone-with-the-link, copy the link. None of them is difficult. The problem is that all of them stand between noticing something on your screen and telling somebody about it, and they repeat unchanged every single time.

Emerald Tools moves that sequence to the moment you set it up. The destination, the folder and the access level are decided once, in two places you never have to revisit, and every capture afterwards ends with a link already on the clipboard.

What the app can and cannot see in your Drive

Emerald Tools asks Google for one scope: drive.file. It is the narrowest scope Drive has, and it means the app can only touch files and folders that it created itself. Your existing documents, your other folders and any shared drives you belong to are not merely off-limits — they are invisible to it, because the API does not return them.

Two consequences follow, and both are worth knowing before you start.

• The upload folder is the app’s own. When it looks for a folder by name, it can only find one it made earlier. Rename that folder in Drive, or move it to the trash, and the next upload quietly creates a new folder under the current name rather than failing.
• Nothing passes through a server of ours. There is no developer-operated server anywhere in this feature; the file goes from your Mac to Google, and the link comes back the same way. The OAuth tokens that authorise it are stored in your macOS Keychain, and Sign Out deletes them. You can also revoke the app’s access from your Google Account permissions page at any time, independently of the app.

The uploaded screenshots are in your own Drive, under your own account, and stay under your control after the app has finished with them — including their sharing, which you can change or withdraw in Drive itself.

Set once, then forget: what each setting decides

Four settings shape every capture that follows. They live in two windows, which is worth spelling out because the split is not obvious: where a capture goes is in Settings, and what happens in Drive is in the dashboard.

Setting	Where	What it decides
Default Destination	Settings > Screenshot	Whether a capture goes to your local folder or to Google Drive
After Capture	Settings > Screenshot	Whether the capture goes straight to that destination, or asks each time
Upload Folder	Dashboard > Google Drive	The name of the Drive folder uploads go into
Link Sharing	Dashboard > Google Drive	Who can open the link: nobody, viewers, commenters, or editors

Link Sharing is a standing decision, not a prompt. There is no dialog after a capture asking how widely to share it — the role you chose is applied to every upload, which is what makes the whole thing finish in one keystroke. If some screenshots need different treatment, the honest way to handle it is to change the setting for that batch, or to share those from Drive yourself.

After Capture is the escape hatch. Set it to Ask each time and every capture pauses on a card offering the local folder or Google Drive, so a Mac that mostly saves locally can still send the occasional shot out as a link without changing the default.

When it does not go to plan

Failure paths are the part of a screenshot tool people meet at the worst possible moment, so they are worth describing plainly.

• Screen Recording permission is missing. Nothing can be captured without it. macOS asks the first time; if it was declined once, macOS will not ask again, so Emerald Tools shows its own alert with a button that opens the right pane of System Settings. Grant it there and restart the app.
• Google Drive is not connected but is the default destination. Instead of capturing into nowhere, the app says so before the capture and offers to open the Google Drive settings.
• The upload fails. The capture is held in memory, not thrown away. The failure card offers Retry, and Save a Copy Locally so the shot survives as a file even if Drive is unavailable.
• The upload succeeds but sharing does not. This is the case worth knowing about, because it looks like success: the file is in Drive and the link is on your clipboard, but the link opens only for you. Emerald Tools says so explicitly rather than letting you paste a link that will fail for the recipient. Organisational Drive policies that forbid anyone-with-link sharing are the usual cause.
• A shortcut does nothing. Shortcuts are off until enabled, and one that another app already holds is refused when you record it, with a message saying so. Both states are visible in Settings > Screenshot > Keyboard Shortcuts.

Specifications and limits

Everything below is the behaviour of the current release, not a plan.

• Capture modes: full screen, selected area, single window.
• Full screen captures the display the pointer is on, at that display’s own resolution.
• Window capture offers the ordinary application windows currently on screen; the desktop, the Dock and menu bar items are not selectable.
• Excluded from every capture: the pointer, and the wallpaper, overlay and widget windows Emerald Tools draws itself — so a screenshot of your desktop does not photograph the app’s own layers.
• File format: PNG, both locally and on Drive.
• File name: Emerald Tools Screenshot, then the date and time — for example Emerald Tools Screenshot 2026-08-23 at 15.30.12.png.
• Default shortcuts: ⇧⌘6 full screen, ⇧⌘7 selected area, ⇧⌘8 window. All three are off until you enable them, and any of them can be re-recorded.
• Link access: don’t share, view, comment, or edit — chosen in advance, applied to every upload.
• Expiring links: not available, a Google Drive limitation.
• OAuth scope: drive.file only.
• Token storage: macOS Keychain, deleted on Sign Out.
• Post-capture card: appears at the corner of the display the pointer is on and clears after five seconds; hovering it stops the countdown.
• Permissions used: Screen Recording for the capture, Notifications for the save and link-copied messages.
• System requirement: macOS 14.0 (Sonoma) or later.

The capture is confirmed before the upload finishes. A Drive upload takes a few seconds, which is long enough to wonder whether the shortcut worked at all. Emerald Tools plays the same shutter sound macOS uses and shows the capture straight away on a card marked as uploading, so the wait happens with the shot visible rather than in silence.